Thursday 11 June 2009

LINKING CHILD PROTECTION AND CENSORSHIP

Many of you are looking at the macro topic of Children and the Media. You should have come across something on the lines of the following, an article about China's plans to install supposedly anti-porn software on computers, taken from the moderately left-wing Guardian newspaper (and thus we can expect an anti-censorship bias): 'And yet it's possible that the government is on the level, that pornography is the target. The immediate impulse with Chinese legislation of this sort is always to look to political freedoms being encroached upon. I would suggest three reasons for this: first, if we were just to take at face value the impulse to control access to internet pornography, it wouldn't look so radically different to that proposed by the Australian Labour party last year. Sure, China moves faster and is somewhat less receptive to criticism, but the methods are the same, and so indeed is the rhetoric – stress the dangers to children, ask yourselves, ­citizens, whether you wouldn't do anything to protect the innocent, and if not, why not, you pervert? It seems important to a sense of western democratic identity to distance itself from China, particularly in situations that don't look very different.'
article - Zoe Williams (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/10/china-firewall-internet-porn)

After the Baby P (moral panic?) story we now have the story of the female (and gender is the shocking hook here) nursery worker who allegedly took images of children, presenting one side of the modern binary opposition of media representation of youth: either as vulnerable, young and innocent and needing protection, or wild and criminal (victim v villain) and needing locking up/the return of corporal punishment (that means getting beaten at school - as with the scene in Son of Rambow). Even in the last few days before this exam its worth keeping any eye/ear out for relevant stories, and observing how they're presented; what narratives they reflect.

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